


Love is an Awful, Complicated Thing

by PepperSeeds



Series: Not Quite Romance [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Allies with Benefits to Friends with Benefits to Lovers, Cats, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Living Together, M/M, Murder, Sort Of, and they were ROOMMATES, arno and de sade have a daughter her name is félicette and she is a cat, de sade is old as balls lmao, happy birthday de sade you old fuck, its ac who is surprised, more like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:34:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24517000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperSeeds/pseuds/PepperSeeds
Summary: The Marquis de Sade is surprisingly likable, much to Arno's chagrin.
Relationships: Arno Dorian/Marquis de Sade
Series: Not Quite Romance [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802629
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	Love is an Awful, Complicated Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Fuckin. I did it. De Sade has his birthday fic. I'm going the hell to BED.

It isn’t the first time he’s fucked de Sade, but it is the first time Arno’s felt anything after. 

He’d ended up with the marquis many times after Élise’s death, chasing any remnants of emotion other than crushing numbness. Sex seemed to do the trick, at least for a few moments. De Sade was also very fond of him. That reminder made his stomach turn. 

Wrestling out of the uncomfortably tight ropes he’d been bound in, he focuses on undoing the knots and not looking at the sated, lax form of the marquis by his side. There’s red marks on his arms where the ropes chafed his skin. The slight sting is the only feeling Arno can focus on as he cleans himself up and redresses. 

“Do return soon!” calls de Sade, but he is already out the window and moving across Paris. 

If he can focus on his footfalls, he is not focusing on how the red marks on his wrist make him think of de Sade kissing them. If he is not focusing on de Sade kissing his wrists, he is not focusing on the warmth that blooms in his chest at the thought. 

He does _not_ have any fondness for the marquis. 

It takes Arno many bottles of wine and two weeks without de Sade’s company to realize he can’t hate the man. He used to, certainly, but not anymore. He refuses to think he could like the marquis, but he doesn’t hate him. He tolerates him. 

Arno tells himself this lie the next time he visits, even as sentiment bubbles traitorously in his chest after de Sade smiles at him. 

He would see him for the last time in a long while after giving de Sade Condorcet’s manuscript. 

It’s 1796 and Arno thinks he’s gotten over de Sade when the man suddenly shows up at the Café Théâtre. Something about a castle in Lacoste, Arno doesn’t recall. His stomach was too busy doing flips at the man’s return. 

“Stay here,” Arno offers. _I’ve missed you_ , he doesn’t add, the words burning in the back of his throat.

Arno hates how easy it is to fall back into familiarity with the marquis, he’s barely been back a few hours and already they’ve made it to his bedroom. He knows sex won’t make de Sade any less unhappy, personal experience has taught him that much, but it will distract him for a short while. Just as before, there are no illusions of intimacy between them. But, discreetly, between pressing his hidden blade to de Sade’s hip and fucking him into the mattress, he hopes the man didn’t notice the ghost of Arno’s lips between his shoulder blades. They fall asleep together for the first time, though on opposite sides of the bed. He can see the ridiculous beads of one of de Sade’s necklaces reflecting moonlight from where it was tossed. 

He hopes to himself that that sight will become an often one. 

Arno wakes to the soft sound of a quill scratching against paper. The sun is barely risen, highlighting de Sade against a backdrop of muted orange and yellow. The marquis, unsurprisingly, isn’t wearing anything. He doesn’t seem to notice Arno is even awake. 

“What are you writing?” he asks, half speaking into a pillow. The man startles, looking over at where Arno’s propped himself up. His face is obscured in shadow but Arno knows him well enough to envision the look of surprise on his face. 

“A letter to my son, Louis,” de Sade replies, turning back to continue writing. 

He hates almost nothing about the marquis, even if he’ll never admit it, not even to himself, but he finds he never enjoys it when Louis is mentioned. He has nothing personal against the man. The thought of de Sade’s eldest child being older than Arno himself leaves a sour taste in his mouth. He knows the marquis has never minded and Arno doesn’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. 

De Sade is still writing when Arno crawls out of bed. Their clothes are strewn about the room, and he busies himself with picking them up before he has to leave for the day. He’s irritated at being up so early, but he’s glad de Sade hadn’t left before he’d woken up. Arno almost laughs when he has to sink into his Sight just to find where the marquis’ damn bracelet ended up. He folds de Sade’s clothing for no other reason than to stall for time, placing the stack along with the jewelry beside where the man is still writing. 

Arno notices the marquis looking up when his things are put on the side table next to him, though he doesn’t know whether it’s to see what Arno is doing or to admire his ass. It could go either way, with de Sade. He finally starts dressing himself afterwards, de Sade taking the opportunity to watch him put on his robes. He doesn’t notice the odd domesticity they’d created until he’s pulling up his hood and opening a door to the balcony. 

“Don’t get yourself arrested before I return, please,” Arno asks. The marquis laughs and Arno makes his way up the wall and across the roof to ignore his want to smile at the sound. 

The two of them settle into a routine quickly enough. De Sade sleeps at the Théâtre and continues to write. Arno comes and goes with semi-regularity, occasionally reading whatever snippet of paper is atop the others. The marquis has practically claimed Arno’s desk, so he moves his things to the rotunda above. After the first few months, de Sade’s presence has lost its novelty and he’s simply become one of the crowd, albeit the only one to ever share Arno’s bed. A few of the marquis’ followers from the Cour des Miracles come along with him to find work as maids, waiters, and actors. 

De Sade also introduces a cat to the Café Théâtre’s crowd. 

Arno first met her when, one morning, he woke to the sound of the marquis cooing over something out on the balcony. More worried if the man would be outside without anything on than whatever he was addressing as “very sweet,” Arno pulls on a pair of breeches and a robe to investigate. He found the marquis leaning against the railing, half-dressed, with a black and white cat butting into his hand. Before Arno can even get a word in, de Sade turns and grins at him. 

“Come meet Félicette!” He starts, turning to plant a kiss atop the cat’s head, “She’s very friendly, Arno.” 

Not seeing any reason to argue, he slides next to the marquis and strokes Félicette’s cheek. She purrs and gives a lick to the tip of his index finger. 

“Why is there a cat on the balcony, de Sade?” Arno asks, raising an eyebrow in the marquis’ direction. He’s seen cats all around Paris, but they’ve never seemed to pay much attention to the people around them. Besides, he doesn’t want to think about how much younger de Sade looks when he genuinely smiles at something. Arno goes back to petting Félicette. 

“Oh, she arrived this morning chasing a bird! Poor little thing didn’t manage to catch it, so I brought her something to eat and now she’s here!” This statement, along with Félicette happily butting her head into the marquis’ cheek, is almost cute. He looks absolutely giddy. Arno sighs, he knows where this is going. De Sade always gets this look when he wants something, and he supposes it must be no different with animals. 

“So we are keeping the cat,” Arno states. De Sade smiles again, this time a softer one that pulls at the far more gently at the wrinkles on his cheeks and makes his eyes sparkle. “I knew you wouldn’t need much convincing,” the marquis says, easily scooping Félicette into his arms to bring her inside. He can live with the cat, he thinks, at least she makes de Sade happy. 

Félicette acclimates to life in the Théâtre rather easily, Madame Gouze adores and spoils her every chance she gets. Not that the marquis is any better, Félicette is likely the best-kept cat in all of Paris. At least, when he comes back from missions, no matter their type, Félicette is always there to greet him with a purr. However, one night Arno returns to not only the cat but to find de Sade and a few actors rehearsing one of his plays. He’d heard a surprising amount of noise downstairs from the balcony, it was near midnight and there was nothing going on at the Café that should have been so loud. He places Félicette gently in the chair by his letterbox, giving her head a gentle kiss before going downstairs. 

“But I trust he does not believe in God!” Exclaims a young woman, reclining against the stage with her script in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Her name is Mallory, if he remembers correctly. 

“Oh, perish the thought!” Replies a man behind her, though Arno can’t recall his name. He’s pacing on the stage, holding his script and gesturing wildly with his free hand. “He is the most notorious atheist,” continues the man on stage, “the most immoral fellow.” 

Arno stops listening in favor of walking over to de Sade. The marquis is settled at a table and seems to be constructing a costume of some sort. 

“How did you convince them to put this on?” Arno asks, pulling up a chair to sit beside him. De Sade only looks up from his sewing for a moment to answer his question. 

“Me? Oh, I did nothing at all!” He claims. Arno knows better than to believe him. “Mallory simply discovered a piece of the script and found it rather interesting, she was the one to bring Jean and the others along with her.” 

Jean must be the man on stage, still gesturing and pacing. He notices a good few people around the two of them have scripts as well, waiting for their parts. Some, Arno recognizes, most he doesn’t. Questioning de Sade further on the matter will get him nowhere. The marquis has a habit of talking circles around him. Instead, he poses a different query. 

“You can sew?” He asks, raising an eyebrow at the man’s handiwork. It certainly looks like he’s done this before. 

The marquis gives a soft hum in response, “Your dressmaker wanted nothing to do with our performance, so I stepped in to improvise.” 

Arno sighs to himself, knowing he’ll have to talk to Rose about it tomorrow. He gives one last glance towards the stage before heading to bed. 

Two weeks after the play is performed for the first time, Arno receives notice that de Sade is wanted for arrest. 

It isn’t surprising, the things de Sade has published are hardly pure, even by Arno’s standards. Still, apparently someone has shifted their priorities to looking for the marquis, and that makes him go cold. He remembers the Bastille, knows that de Sade had spent most of his children’s childhoods imprisoned. The worst part, at least to Arno, is how he had gotten so used to the marquis’ presence that the thought of him being taken nearly makes him sick. 

So Arno does what he always does, ignores his emotions by doing something else. Namely, sabotaging the investigation before anyone realizes the man they are hunting for has been practically living in plain sight for the past two years. Destroying the orders is the easy part, a quick toss of papers into a fireplace does the trick nicely. The hard part is tracking down the guards that somehow realized that de Sade still frequents the Cour des Miracles quite often. 

He follows a trio of men to the slums, trailing them from above. The closer they get the more worried Arno becomes, until he slides down the side of a building to follow more closely from the ground. He sinks into his Sight, just for a moment, to locate de Sade. He doesn’t often use his Sight around the marquis anymore, as it tends to highlight the man in the same gold that Élise used to be. Arno hates that even his Sight has decided de Sade is important. 

The guards round a corner, he knows they’ve seen their target when they pick up their pace. There’s no avoiding it anymore, it’s not like the marquis can go anywhere. He ducks around a cart and pushes just behind one of the guards as he begins to shout. 

Arno buries his hidden blade in the man’s throat. He hardly got a word out. 

The rest of the fight is mostly a blur. He remembers the crowd bursting with noise as they run just after the first guard drops. He remembers firing his gun into the face of another, ducking and twirling to slash at the last man’s jugular. Arno’s face and arms are covered in blood and viscera. He comes back to himself at the sound of de Sade’s voice. 

“Arno?” The marquis looks shocked, looking at the gore at his feet, seeming without explanation. 

“We need to go,” he says, and it isn’t an explanation at all, “More of them will arrive if we don’t.” 

The walk back to the Café Théâtre takes them through many back alleys. Normally, scaling the buildings and moving across the rooftops would be enough to keep most guards off his tail, but he can’t bring de Sade along with him that way. He’s worried about what might happen if they separate and more guards arrive. The consequence of not being up on the Paris roofs is that he has to deal with the marquis’ silence as they walk together. 

It’s unnerving. De Sade is usually always talking, gesturing, going through some dramatic motion or another. Arno can feel the man’s eyes on him and that stare isn’t the one he usually favors. There isn’t any lust in his gaze, just confusion. Arno doesn’t want to explain and yet he’s afraid of what will happen if he says nothing. 

When they finally make it back to the Théâtre, they head for Arno’s room. Each passing second feels an eternity. Arno peels off his coat and shirt, both soaked through with blood. He doesn’t think he can start whatever discussion they are supposed to have. He’s thankful, then, when de Sade speaks first. 

“So,” he starts, voice soft, “What was the reason for killing those men?” 

He wants a confession of some sort. The marquis likely knows what the guards were there for, he isn’t unaware of his own status. 

“They were sent to take you,” Arno replies, avoiding looking at de Sade’s face. He doesn’t want to know what the man is thinking of him at the moment. “I stopped them.” 

_“Why?”_

He takes a deep breath. He’s been at many points like this one during his life, most he didn’t recognize at the time. There will be no going back after this, he wants to sink back into himself. The fact that de Sade has come to mean this much to him is… jarring. 

Arno makes his choice. 

“I had no desire to see you imprisoned again,” he says, hiding behind the half-truth. He looks over and catches the marquis’ gaze, sharp and considering. It softens when their eyes lock, and Arno worries de Sade has realized. Anxiety coils low in his gut. He never intended for his fondness to be known. 

_You’ve killed for him before._

_Not like this._

He notices, belatedly, that de Sade has walked towards him. Three quick steps with his heels clicking softly against the floor. Arno notices his perfume, of all things, before he notices he’s being kissed. He freezes for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. In the end, it’s the marquis cupping his cheek that has him kissing back. It’s a strange kiss, at least as far as de Sade is concerned. It lacks all the roughness their lust-drunk kisses usually possess. He drifts his fingers up to rest his hand on de Sade’s hip. 

They break apart after a few moments, Arno opens his mouth to say something, he doesn’t know what, when something bumps into his calf. Félicette meows, a clear protest at being left out of the attention, and the marquis laughs as he crouches down to pet her. Arno almost worries, before de Sade looks back up at him and smiles. 

“Thank you.” 

Nightfall comes quickly and Arno is glad when the last of his official errands are finally completed. The emotional high from earlier still lingers, though all it’s done is exhaust him. He wants to collapse in bed and sleep for a week. Scaling the Café’s walls with practiced ease, the moonlight above him illuminating his room through the high windows. Félicette is asleep on Arno’s chair next to his letterbox, as she usually is, and bunched under his covers is the sleeping figure of de Sade. 

He’s quiet as to not wake either of them, stripping off his clothes and crawling into bed. He’s facing the marquis this time, admiring the curve of his throat and shoulders. Arno wonders if, at some point in the future, there would be enough softness between them as to allow him to run his fingers there. He looks so much smaller like this, without his wig and shoes. The tenderness that spreads in him isn’t unfamiliar anymore, but perhaps this time…

Perhaps this time, he won’t have to suppress its presence. 

Arno’s eyes had just started to close when he felt the marquis shift. He doesn’t make much of it until he feels a few fingers run across his cheek. He opens his eyes again to see de Sade is staring at him. 

“I suppose I should tell you “thank you” more often, hmm?” De Sade whispers, moving to trace the scar on Arno’s face. He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it, but he catches the marquis’ wrist to bring his hand down, placing a chaste kiss to his palm. De Sade’s hand is soft and warm, delicate beneath his lips. 

The man blinks twice before smiling and extracting his hand, shifting closer so that their noses almost touch. This time it’s Arno who’s tracing his face, mapping the marquis’ wrinkles with his index finger. De Sade seems to figure out what he’s doing, snorting and batting his hand away. 

“I’m well aware of my age, Arno, no need to remind me.” 

He sighs and very much wants to sleep, but he spares a moment to move his head to kiss at the mole on the marquis’ chin. 

“My youth has never bothered you,” Arno says, punctuated by a yawn, “Go to sleep.”

Waking up next to de Sade isn’t new, but waking up with him pressed against Arno’s chest definitely is. He doesn’t seem to be all that awake, but he shifts closer when Arno moves to get out of bed, making a soft noise of protest. It’s very odd to be the first one up. 

The domestic moment is quickly broken, however, when Félicette jumps onto the bed and crawls between them. Arno laughs as de Sade sputters in indignation, Félicette butting into his face and meowing. He takes this opportunity to slip out of bed, smiling as the marquis loses his irritation when Félicette begins to purr and licks his nose. 

“I’ll bring some coffee up,” Arno offers, pulling on a pair of breeches, a shirt, and a pair of slippers. De Sade smiles at him as Félicette walks up the pillows and around his hair, playfully nipping at a few of the blond strands. 

He heads downstairs, the Café mostly quiet as it wasn’t officially open yet. People busied themselves with preparing the salon for the day. Simone, an ex-prostitute from de Sade’s group of followers, is behind the bar this morning. She smiles at him and makes two cups of coffee without being asked. If Arno was more awake, perhaps he would have questioned it, but he’s still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Eventually, he makes his way back upstairs, now with two cups in his hands. 

De Sade had been successful in getting Félicette off of him and seems to be trying to look for something when Arno returns. Félicette keeps walking in front of him, however, and he hears the marquis tut that she’s going to be the death of him one day. Setting the coffee down on the nearest table, de Sade turns to look at him.

“So _that_ is where my shirt went!” He laughs, crossing his arms over his bare chest, “I was beginning to worry Félicette made off with it.” 

Blushing, he looks down to find that yes, he is indeed wearing the marquis’ shirt. The low neckline is rather distinctive. He goes to take it off, but de Sade strides forward to place a kiss at his collar, stopping the motion. 

“You look very nice in my things,” He mumbles, voice muffled against Arno’s neck. Snorting, all previous embarrassment gone, he wraps his arms around the marquis’ waist. 

“This does not mean you get to try on my hidden blade.” 

“Damn.” 

The days go by, neither of them discuss the change in their relationship. They kiss far more often than they did before, de Sade still has his fascination with seeing Arno bound beneath him, and the Théâtre continues as it always has. 

Though, if you were to ask de Sade, the most important part would be that Félicette did eventually make off with his shirt. Neither of them have the heart to take it back from her.

**Author's Note:**

> Arno: *falls in love with de sade somehow*
> 
> Arno: _shit fuck no this wasn't supposed to happen_
> 
> Félicette's attitude is modeled after my own cat, Zoe, and named after the cat France shot into space. Love that lil baby she contributed to SCIENCE!


End file.
